Hello Everyone!
A slacking writer, A dispersal of cloud cover, Keeping the water flowing & Yup dirt is what I am growing!
It is a few hours after sunset and once again I have been slacking on getting anything written today. Since I have been failing to do it when I first wake up... I have more or less transitioned into doing it in the evening... preferably in the early evening so I do not have to struggle against fatigue! Not that I am feeling particularly fatigued after three days of inclement weather... but I do tend to start feeling sleepy not all that long after the sun goes down.
Anyways, the rainy weather stuck around for another day but at least some of the cloud cover dispersed and the sun actually came out on and off throughout the day. At one point late in the afternoon I went outside to do some chores (because it was looking so sunny) but as soon as I stepped foot out the door I realized it was still drizzling rain. It was not quite hard enough of a rain to be a real deterrent but I decided that 'any excuse will do' and headed back indoors.
Eventually the rain stopped and I was able to collect some of the fallen branches around the shelter site, get in some hiking and also do that maintenance on the water breaks that I mentioned yesterday. It was really only one water break (for that big puddle in the road) and I was very pleased to find that it only took some light work with a garden rake to clear out its drainage channel.
While I had the rake with me I also checked all the other 'low spots' (including the one in the driveway that I had patched with cob) and everything was looking good and the only standing water that I found was in the meadow... where it should be. Since there will probably be a lot more rainy weather over the coming weeks... I should probably do some real maintenance on the rest of the water breaks but for now everything seems to be draining the water away well enough.
Now that I am thinking of it, I should actually do that maintenance sooner rather than later because the leaves have yet to start dropping en masse... and I never cleaned any of the drainage systems last year. I probably could have knocked out the bulk of it today if I had been feeling motivated enough to carry the shovel along with me as well as the rake but meh.
Having created the majority of those water breaks (and drainage channels) with a trencher they sure have held up well and although it is not a perfect system... the roads stay rather free of puddles and potholes. Even that puddling that occurred during all this recent rain would not have occurred had I done the 'routine maintenance' that is only 'routine' if I make it a routine!
Alright, I better move on to another topic because my thoughts are 'circling the drain' there and now I am thinking of all the various water diversions, water breaks, drainage channels and whatnot... that all keep the water going where I want it to! I doubt that I could even spell out (or clearly recall) all of them given how many of them I have in operation around here... but hey at least they work!
Speaking of something 'working' I am really glad that I took the time to 'roll' that soil in the topsoil trap because even after all the rain the new soil is not getting washed away. It is in fact getting deposited among all the old soil in the furrows that I created when I churned the soil around with the shovel before the rains started.
There was only one small 'pinky finger wide' stream of soil runoff that has escaped the trap and it dwindles off 'to nothing' only a meter or so downhill from the trap itself... so I will count that as a win. Like I mentioned a while back, that terraced area below the trap is completely full of new soil and is now a flat area. So, if I am going to release any more soil (from the trap) then I need to either make a channel to divert the runoff to a new terrace... or add some logs to the downhill side of the existing terrace to catch the soil.
Although I like the idea of making a new terrace... there is only so much that I can do with the terrain itself to achieve that goal. In other words it would probably be 'safest' to build up the downhill side of the existing terrace... and also try to divert the soil to a new terrace. That way if the terrain will not quite accommodate the runoff being effectively diverted I will not lose any soil in the process by it overwhelming the existing terrace's fortifications.
I swear that frigging topsoil trap was probably the best thing that I could have done when I was initially setting this site up. As funny as it is I am always quite impressed by how nice the soil is when I disturb it and often think something along the lines of: Yup! That is why you are a dirt farmer! All of which probably sounds funnier in my head than it really is but there you have it!
Having never had much of a 'green thumb' I think that I have overcompensated by getting good at making soil... which kind of makes sense, since many of my failed gardening projects were due to poor soil conditions. Besides focusing on the worms next (in my my dirt farming project) I think that I am going to experiment with harvesting some of the ample ant mound soil around here.
The only thing that I need to be careful of with the ant mound soil is making sure that I get it from mounds that are abandoned so that I do not accidentally spread the ant population around even more than it already is. Basically I want to avoid bringing them closer to the shelter site (where all my dirt farming endeavors happen) so this winter I want to come up with a process for first checking the mound for activity and then harvesting the mounds themselves in an efficient manner.
Okay, on that note I am going to wrap this entry up and get on with the editing and posting portion of my evening. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
Thanks for reading!
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